The Topic of Ecce Homo

On 13 November 1888, Nietzsche wrote to his close friend Franz Overbeck1 about Ecce Homo: ‘an absolutely important book, gives some psychological and even biographical details about me and my writings; people will at last see me. The tone of the work, one of gay detachment fraught with a sense of destiny, as is everything I write’ (1996: 324). Ecce Homo, an attempt at an autobiography, was conceived and written at the very end of Nietzsche’s career and just before his mental collapse, but not published until 1908, eight years after his death. It is a text which can be read as challenging both the autobiographical and the philosophical expectations of the reader, as it manifests an unprecedented merging of the ‘psychological’ and the ‘biographical’ with the ‘philosophical’, a merging of the ‘me’ with ‘my writings’, only to disclose as clearly as possible the ‘me’ of Nietzsche. Perhaps this is what Aaron Ridley implies when he calls the book ‘a strange sort of autobiography’ (Ridley in Nietzsche 2007a: viii), disturbing and undermining the very genre (autobiography) to which it is supposed to belong, a transgression which is documented and elaborated on by Douglas G. Wright in 2